About Us
Mission:
The Springfield Sharks Swim Club is a competitive swim team with the mission to build the swimming skills and general life skills of our community’s youth.
Competitive Swimming Goals:
We aim to build skills in the four competitive strokes, helping children improve their times so that they can reach their ultimate swimming potential, whether that be simply improving their times, meeting qualifying times for various important meets in high school swimming, or even reaching the point where they can join and/or be recruited for a collegiate swim team. We believe that competition, approached, modeled, and engaged in properly, helps grow healthy and competent humans. We aim to foster commitment to swimming not only as a hobby, not only as a childhood sport, not only as a high school sport, but ultimately as a lifestyle sport that a person can use to maintain their health throughout their life. We want to build continuity in swimming so that we can continue improving our standing within the swimming community in Western Massachusetts.
General Life Skills Goals:
We use our swim practice to help our swimmers develop their grit, resilience, persistence, responsibility, selflessness, good citizenship, commitment, teamwork and cooperation, and humility. We help our swimmers learn to take responsibility for their own choices and actions. Our coaching staff model 100% effort and commitment, and as such we demand the same from our swimmers. We believe high expectations result in improved performance and improve general outcomes. We aim to help our swimmers become strong – not only physically, not only mentally; ultimately we want our swimmers to become strong enough to consistently make the choices that will help make the world a better place for everyone.
Learn-to-Swim Goals:
In addition to our competitive arm, which is our primary function, the Springfield Sharks also run a learn-to-swim program. This program is for children who have not yet developed the skills and endurance needed to compete, but still wish to build their swimming skills. We teach our learn-to-swim participants safety skills and respect for the water that they can carry with them the rest of their lives. We build the skills that they need in order to join the competitive side of the club using teaching methods that focus on the needs of each individual participant. This program provides swim instruction to those who might otherwise have trouble with access.
The Springfield Sharks are an important organization for providing swimming instruction and access to competitive swimming for Springfield residents and members of the larger Western Massachusetts community.